Stephen Leather: The Bombmaker

'What about the remote control?' asked Patsy.

'The what?' Deep frowns creased Hoyle's forehead.

'The infrared remote control. She had it rigged so that if she pressed it, it would go off.'

Hoyle's frown deepened. 'No way,' he said. 'Timer, batteries, detonators. There was nothing else in the circuit. Pressing the remote control wouldn't have done a blind thing.'

'Are you sure?'

Hoyle looked offended. Patsy began to laugh, and Hoyle stared at her in surprise. She shook her head, still laughing. 'She was bluffing,' she said to Denham. 'She was bloody well bluffing.'

Denham's mobile phone warbled and he took it out and put it to his head. Patsy stopped laughing as Denham listened, then frowned. 'Yes, Eamonn.' Patsy watched Denham's face, wondering if it was good news or bad.

Denham put his hand over the bottom of the phone. 'They've found Katie.' A smile spread across his face. 'She's okay. They locked her in a basement. She's scared but she's okay.'

Patsy grinned. She took a quick step forward and hugged Denham, burying her face in his chest and squeezing him so hard that he gasped.

Denham hugged her back, then pulled away. 'I have to call Andy,' he said, then he smiled. He held out the phone to Patsy. 'Why don't you do it?'

The wrought-iron gates swung open and the Mercedes nudged slowly into the compound. Deng didn't recognise the man standing guard by the gate, but that wasn't significant. The firm that supplied him with bodyguards changed the personnel on a regular basis. The only constants were his driver and the man who was sitting in the front passenger seat. Like the rest of the guards assigned to protect Deng, they were armed. Ever since the debacle in London, he'd had three men in the house protecting his wife and sons, and there were always at least two others with him.

He climbed out of the Mercedes and went into his house. The maid wasn't there to take his cashmere coat from him, so he hung it up himself and went through to the sitting room.

His two sons, the elder aged twelve, the other just eighteen months younger, were sitting together on the sofa, an expensive white leather model that Deng had had flown in from Milan. He glared at the boys. 'Didn't we tell you not to sit on the sofa in your school clothes?' he said. 'Why haven't you changed?'

The boys said nothing. The younger one was close to tears.

'What's wrong with you? And where's your mother?'

'She's with me,' said a voice behind him.

Deng froze. He turned slowly. Michael Wong was standing at the door to the kitchen, Deng's wife at his side. Her eyes looked at Deng fearfully, then over at her sons. She gave them an encouraging smile and made a small waving motion with a neatly manicured hand, trying to reassure them that everything was going to be all right now that their father was home. Deng took a deep breath. It wasn't going to be all right. Michael Wong had come for his revenge.

Wong pushed Deng's wife into the room and she tottered forward on her high heels, then ran to Deng and grabbed him around the waist and buried her face in his chest. Two big men in cheap suits and red-and-black-striped ties followed Wong into the sitting room. As the door swung back, Deng could see three bloodstained bodies on the kitchen floor. His bodyguards. And against the fridge, sitting up but with her head slumped against her chest, the maid. Her throat cut wide open.

The two men who came out of the kitchen were Red Poles, Triad heavies, but they weren't the two men who'd been in the love hotel when Wong had murdered the nightclub hostess. These two were shorter and heavier and had the rough skin and bad haircuts of mainlanders. One of them was holding a silenced automatic. The other had a roll of insulation tape in his hand. Deng looked at them over the head of his sobbing wife. 'I'll pay you ten times what he's paying you,' he said to them.

They laughed at him.

'Twenty times,' said Deng. 'I'll get you new identities, new passports. Hong Kong passports. I can do it. Plus twenty times what he's paying you.'

They laughed even louder, and Wong laughed along with them. The front door opened and the bodyguard who'd been in the Mercedes walked into the sitting room. The Red Pole with the silenced gun shot the bodyguard twice in the chest and he dropped to the floor without a sound. The driver never came into the house. When he wasn't working, he stayed in a small flat above the garage, too far away to hear what was going on in the main building.

The two Red Poles went over to Deng. The one with the gun pulled his wife away, grabbing her by the hair and throwing her over to Wong. The other heavy pushed Deng in the chest and he staggered backwards. The heavy seized him by the lapel and spun him down into a chair, and then quickly wound the insulation tape around his legs and arms, tying him fast.

'I thought I'd run through the programme I've planned,' said Wong. 'Just so you know what's coming.' He ran a hand down Deng's wife's breasts and between her legs. She squirmed in his grasp but he tightened his grip around her throat. She was looking at Deng with pleading eyes, but he knew there was nothing he could do. Nothing he could say, either, to her, or to Wong. There were no words with which to apologise to her for the horrors that lay ahead, nothing he could say to Wong to make him change his mind. The only option was acceptance. 'I'm going to fuck your wife,' continued Wong. 'Not because it'll give me pleasure, you understand. She has the face of a pig, and her body's not much better. I can see why you're always screwing hookers whenever you go to Hong Kong.'

Deng's wife moaned in despair and Wong twisted her head around so that he could look into her tear-filled eyes. 'Oh, poor baby,' he said. 'Didn't you know? Didn't you guess? Young girls. Pretty girls. He takes them to a love hotel in Kowloon Kong. He's probably thinking about them on the rare occasions he screws you.' He grinned at Deng and released his grip on the woman and kicked her over to two of the Red Poles. They grabbed her, an arm each, supporting her because the strength had gone from her legs and she could barely stand. 'Then my men will fuck her. In any way they choose.' Deng's wife began to sob uncontrollably. The two boys were staring at their mother in horror.

Wong gestured at the large man standing at the door to the kitchen. He was big and broad-shouldered, with close-cut hair and a round, line-free face. He had thick lips which he kept licking with a square-shaped tongue. 'Cheung here, he likes boys. It's all I can do to keep him out of prison.'

Cheung laughed throatily.

'He really likes your sons,' said Wong. 'So he's going to play with your boys for a while. Then he's going to kill them.'

Cheung opened his jacket and pulled out a curved knife. He ran his finger along the edge of the blade, still chuckling.

Deng kept his eyes fixed on Wong, his face impassive. There was no point in showing any emotion. That was what Wong wanted. A reaction. Appeals for mercy. He wanted to see Deng on his hands and knees, begging for his life and the life of his family. Deng knew that any such appeals would be ignored, so he kept his teeth clamped together and waited for the end.

Deng's elder son started to cry, and the younger boy put his arm around him and tried to comfort him. Deng was suddenly immensely proud of the young boy, not yet a teenager but already behaving more like a man than he could ever have imagined.

Wong held out his hand and one of the Red Poles gave him a baseball bat. Wong swung it by his side, the end brushing against the carpet that Deng's wife had had specially woven in Bangkok, to a design of her own. She was so proud of the carpet, it was the first thing she pointed out to visitors to their home.